Book Review: 99 Observations on the Advertising Agency Business in the 60’s and 70’s by Gary D. Bringgold with Dean R. Oberpriller
Back a while ago, there was a prestigious television program titled Mad Men, which was about a fictitious advertising agency in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. It was very popular and influential, even if some claim the storylines were less authentic than sensational. Among its byproducts was this volume, a memoir/advice book by an advertising executive from Minnesota who’d been active in those years and in 2013 was preparing for retirement.
As the title suggests, the book is broken into 99 “chapters”, ranging from the succinct #75: Office Romance. “Don’t.” to as many as three pages. Mr. Bringgold was more on the “account executive” side, trying to bring clients to his agencies and satisfy them, rather than the “creative” side that actually made the ads. He states that both are necessary but have different skillsets and it’s not necessarily good to have one manager handle both areas. He also decided early on not to try to get into the NYC agencies, even though those were the ones with the most prestige and money.
Those looking for juicy gossip will be disappointed; Mr. Bringgold depicts himself as a nose to the grindstone kind of guy, focusing on work and not scandal. There are a few anecdotes, and a little bit about the changes in technology over the years, but a lot of the advice is very general and generic.
Notably, the author rejects the notion that advertising is full of lies or even the intent to mislead. False claims get the agency in trouble (eventually) and the one time the Federal Trade Commission got involved with one of his campaigns, it was apparently because the client had given false information in the first place and Mr. Bringgold’s agency was let off the hook.
There’s a bit of what can come off as sexism; Mr. Bringgold points out that the number of women in the advertising industry has skyrocketed over the decades, and an agency that has hired a large proportion of female workers could be vulnerable to ill-timed pregnancies and associated leaves of absence, plus the emotional effect of periods.
The short chapters make this book easy to digest, but it’s a bit bland. A hard-hitting expose it’s not. Recommended to young people considering a career in advertising or related business to get a bit of a feel for what it might involve.
